by Simon Morden
‘This isn’t good,’ she whispered.
‘Worked that out for myself.’
The room inside had a fire in the grate, drawing hard in the draught, crackling hard and burning bright. Chairs and tables were strewed across the floor, overturned, some broken, plates and mugs mixed in with the debris. There was a closed door in each of the far corners.
‘Left or right?’
‘Both of them, eventually. So it doesn’t matter.’ He thought of his grandfather, waving his age-spotted sword and screaming his defiance like he was still a young man facing his enemies. Then, the war-cries had been a party piece: now, he was repeating them silently, his tongue and lips finding their way around the syllables and accents of his ancestors. ‘Left.’
He picked his way across the floor, trying to be as quiet as possible, though he didn’t exactly know why. He put his fingertips against the door, gave it a little shove: it creaked a little, a crack of weak light opening out. He glanced around at Mary, who was busy shoving a fallen crust into her mouth.
‘What?’ she said, spitting out crumbs. ‘I’m fucking starving.’
He rolled his eyes and put the flat of his hand to the wood. The door swung aside.
It took a moment, then a moment longer, then a very long moment that only ended when Mary reached past him, leaning out around him so she didn’t have to set foot inside that back room, and pulled the door shut again.
‘No,’ she said. ‘No, no, no, no, no. No.’
She pulled him back, all the way to the entrance, and he let himself be led, unblinking, to where the wind buffeted his clothes and tugged at his loose hair.
Mary looked up at him, and he’d never thought of himself as tall until that moment.
‘You said a wolf. A wolf!’
‘Yes,’ he admitted, ‘that’s what I said.’
‘That, that thing is not a wolf.’ Her voice was as tight as a drum, as high as a bat.
‘But it is Stanislav. I guess.’ He finally did blink, and the fleeting instant of his eyes closing showed him a writhing mass of barbed tentacles, tooth-lined mouths, glistening, dripping spikes, vacuous sucking holes, and eyes. So many eyes, and all of them disturbingly human.
‘We can’t fight that,’ said Mary, pointing back inside.
‘I know, I know. But … it’s him.’
‘Dalip. He’s gone. Whatever he was, has gone.’
‘But you, you’ve changed backwards and forwards. Maybe he still can.’
‘I change into a bird. The first couple of times almost broke me. You ever seen him like that before?’
‘No,’ he said.
‘When Crows was showing me how to do magic, I got a bit carried away. This … thing, like that thing, appeared. It was sort of me, but not me. I told it to fuck right off, and it disappeared. If Stanislav took one look at his true self and gave it a big, wet kiss, then he’s finished as a human being. Your mate’s come home. That’s what he really wants to be.’
Dalip thought about the shifting, pulsating mass, constantly forming and breaking down. A wolf, a werewolf even, would have been reasonable, understandable. Instead, they had unfathomable chaos.
‘What should I do?’ he asked.
‘You cannot go in there. I mean, fuck. Did you see what he’s done to the guards?’
Dalip had. There were bits of them everywhere, just rolling around on the floor at the urging of the ever-moving tentacles, and some seemed to be in the process of being absorbed into the main mass.
‘There might be part of him I can still talk to.’
‘No!’ She slapped his arm. Twice. ‘No. Your parents – and at least you’ve got parents – are going to want you back, and I’m not telling them you fed yourself to some monster because you thought you ought to try or some other shit excuse. Just no.’
‘So what happens now?’
‘I don’t fucking know. You’re supposed to be the smart one. Think of something … smart.’
Dalip tried, but couldn’t. All he could think of were tentacles with teeth like chainsaw blades, turning, always turning.
‘Let’s go back to the tower,’ he said.
‘That’s an idea I can get behind. And you know what? I’m going to run.’
She did, and Dalip was right behind her.
29
Mary sat herself down in front of Bell and steepled her fingers. ‘We have a problem.’
‘You have a problem,’ said the geomancer.
‘No, we have a problem. And it’s your fault. So what we’re going to do is find a way to fix it, before anything else happens. Stanislav—’
‘The man, the one who attacked me—’
‘The one you took and put in a cell. That one. Turns out that’s the worst thing you could possibly have done. He’s got bad memories of some war he fought in, and now it’s all spilling out of him like a sewer. So you’re going to tell us how we deal with this, one way or another, before he comes for you, and then decides that the rest of us are part of the meal deal as well.’
Bell touched the scab on the end of her nose. ‘You can just fly away. So can I.’
‘I think I know how this works,’ said Mary. ‘You get to become what it is you want to be, deep down, but you also don’t get much of a choice over it. So the fact that you change into a dragon tells me everything I need to know about you. You’re like that whether or not you’ve wings and a tail. Stop shitting me, because you’re not getting away from here.’ She leaned closer. ‘If it comes down to it, I will throw you to him. And if you’re lucky, he’ll kill you first.’
‘She doesn’t mean that,’ said Mama quickly.
‘I do. I really mean it. Cross my heart. So tell us, what the hell do we do?’
Bell shrugged and looked away. ‘I don’t know everything. I’ve been here for twenty years, as far as I can tell, and I know half of what I need to.’
‘And we’ve been here for a week.’ It was longer than that, but she wasn’t going to split hairs. ‘Why don’t we start with what’s happened to him.’
‘You tell me. Some people – the ones most susceptible to change – get the idea that they can turn into a creature. Then they do. That’s all there is to it. Some survive. Most don’t. At least, this is what I’ve been told. Down is riddled with beasts that used to be someone, and can’t change back. What form is he?’
‘Formless,’ said Dalip. ‘A thing with teeth and claws and arms and eyes.’
‘I remember,’ said Bell, ‘back in the beginning, I found myself in a dream, staring at the void. It tried to suck me in, but I refused to go.’
‘I had the same dream,’ Mary said. ‘If Stanislav did, too, then night after night, locked in a cell, no one to talk him out of it …’
‘Almost as if that’s what Down is, its raw essence. It changes everything it comes into contact with.’ Bell drifted off with a thoughtful expression, and that wasn’t what Mary wanted.
‘Enough of the whatever-stuff. He’s already killed your guards, those that didn’t have the sense to run away, the two servant women you had are missing, your steward bloke, and I don’t think he’s going to be that worried about adding us to his score. Can we change him back?’
‘No,’ said Bell.
Mary heard Dalip shift behind her.
‘Can we, I don’t know, tame him in some way?’
‘No. Any more than you or I can be tamed.’
‘Can we … lock him in a room somewhere so that he’ll never be able to get out?’
Bell snorted. ‘If you want to stop him, you’ll have to kill him.’
‘Can we kill him?’
She shrugged. ‘If he’s that different from us, he might be impossible to damage him enough to finish him: where’s his heart, his brain, how does he bleed? When we change, we have a fixed form. We’re beasts, but we’re mo
rtal, for the want of a better word.’
‘I proved that with you.’ Mary sat back and wondered if Bell was telling her the truth. She’d admitted that this was outside her own experience, and perhaps this had never happened before. Perhaps it had, and there’d been no survivors left to tell the tale. It could be that dotted all over Down were dark places, filled with visceral, primal hate, and a monster feeding from it.
‘Fire,’ said Dalip. ‘We’re going to have to use fire. If words don’t work, of course.’
That made a sort of sense. It was quite clear that if any of them got too close to Stanislav in his changed form, he could deal with them however he wanted, singly or all at once.
‘And how the fuck are we supposed to do that?’ Mary thought of all the things they didn’t have: petrol, empty bottles, lighter fluid, fireworks, tyres, old mattresses and settees, meths, even flaming sambucas.
‘There’s some bottles of spirit in the store room, and that might burn. Magic? Can you magic up fire?’ Dalip turned on the geomancer. ‘You can, can’t you? In the pit, you light all the candles.’
‘That’s as much as I can do.’
‘And I’m not happy with a plan that involves her in any way. Not happy at all.’ Mary got to her feet and looked around her, hands on hips. ‘What else?’
‘Everything will burn if you try hard enough,’ offered Bell. ‘Even stone.’
‘You can just shut up now. Dalip, how big a fire do we need?’
He frowned as he thought, then looked puzzled. ‘How am I supposed to work that out? It’s not like there are books I can find the answer in.’
‘Guess, then.’
‘Huge. The bigger the better. If we think we’ve got enough, we haven’t.’
The storm rattled the doors, shaking them free, and Luiza and Elena went to shore them up.
Mama shivered. ‘Are we going to make it to morning?’
‘We’ll be fine, Mama,’ said Mary. ‘We could leave now if we wanted, and no one would stop us. Right, Bell?’
The doors, flapping in the wind, were tamed again.
‘Then why don’t we?’ Mama wore a hopeful expression. ‘Stanislav was a good man, but he’s turned into all kinds of wrong now. He’s beyond our help, and we’re putting ourselves in danger – more danger by staying.’
‘How far away is Crows’ castle?’ asked Dalip.
‘A day’s walk. Down the river, turn towards the rising sun. Keep going. We can get there no problem, but we can’t just leave Stanislav as he is. Can we?’
‘You can. You can go. Seriously, that makes sense. Take the others and go to Crows’ castle; yes, it’s not the best of weather, but it’s not like before in London. It’s not going to kill us.’
‘Don’t be too sure of that,’ said Bell.
Mary gazed at the ceiling. ‘Go on, then. Tell us.’
‘The storm, like so many other things on Down, is alive. It’s not just wind and rain, thunder and lightning. It’s spiteful. It’ll change direction just to hunt you down. It’ll find you and be fiercest where you are.’
‘Terrific. Why the fuck would it want to do that? I thought Down liked us.’
‘Do I look like I’m in charge?’ Bell shrugged. ‘It’s having a tantrum. You should know what that’s like.’
Thunder rolled down the mountainside, close and loud.
‘It’s just taking the piss now.’ Mary stared at Dalip. ‘What do we do?’
‘I really don’t know.’ He held his hands out to show he had nothing. Nothing but a knife, which was all but useless. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Anyone? Anything?’
No one had.
‘Fuck it,’ she said. ‘We need a better plan than waiting for Stanislav to come crawling up the stairs and cut us into little bits.’
‘You arm yourselves with the bottles. I’m going to try to talk to him,’ said Dalip. ‘That’s all I’ve got left, and I’d rather do that down there than up here. If it all goes wrong, then we’re trapped.’
‘We’re trapped anyway by a storm that actually hates us and wants us to die. Which means you can’t go out.’
‘I’ll risk it. Take one for the team.’ He even smiled as he said it.
‘That’s just stupid. We have to do better.’ Mary balled her fists. ‘Come on! This is not how it’s supposed to end.’
Any reply he might have made was lost in a deep bass rumble that shook the tower to its foundations.
‘Do you want me to come with you?’ she asked.
‘You might want to put on some more clothes first.’
‘I’m not distracting you, am I?’
‘I’m just worried you’ll catch a cold.’ He rolled his eyes. ‘I’m starting to sound like my mother.’
‘Right, people. Find me something to wear. It might be something I’m going to be seen dead in, so let’s make it good.’
After their previous search of the room, Elena knew where the clothes were stored. She heaved open the lid of the trunk and started to hold shirts and skirts up. The choice was poor – closing time at a jumble sale poor – and she was about to settle for a set of cast-offs that had come from the backs of those born centuries earlier, when Elena showed her something different.
It was rich and heavy and long, a bright red shot through with gold thread, like something a Spanish princess would wear while escaping from her evil uncle. It was gloriously impractical, with heavy skirt and laced-up bodice, sleeves that started just below the shoulders and a neckline that would get her arrested back in London.
‘That one.’
‘Seriously?’ said Dalip.
‘Oh, come on. It’s gorgeous.’ She held her arms out wide as Elena held it up against her. ‘I’d never be able to afford anything like this, ever. And I can just put it on: it doesn’t matter if it fits perfectly, or whose it really is.’
Dalip shook his head, which just made Mary all the more determined.
‘Go and find your turban, or something. This might take a while.’
Elena gathered up the skirts, and Mary all but crawled inside. Mama padded the wounds on her back with murmurs of concern and squares of torn-up shirt. Luiza pulled the laces tight to hold everything in place, shortening and lengthening them to fit the curve of her back.
She suddenly had shape and form. She stood up straighter and held her shoulders back, instead of in their customary slouch. She dragged her fingers through her hair and away from her face, the oily spirals slipping across the skin at her knuckles.
She was the Red Queen at last, terrible and beautiful, even with – or because of – the bruises and scrapes and cuts that marked and mottled her.
Dalip had found a plain scarf and fashioned a bandanna-style turban out of it, drawing it tight across his forehead and covering his hair. He, still in the dirty orange boilersuit: she, radiant in her finery. He had to turn away, and she felt … She didn’t know what she felt. Pride? Confidence? Something like that. It wasn’t the dress. It wasn’t the way he looked at her. They were simply two signposts to the destination. Part of her, which had always been missing, had snapped into place.
‘Wish us luck,’ she said. Her skirts swished against the floor as she walked to the top of the steps. She’d never had anything that had swished before.
Dalip picked up the knife and followed her. To Mary, the blade seemed hopelessly short for the task, but he clutched at it anyway. It was his strength, and she wasn’t going to point out its inadequacies. In order to take the stairs, she had to hold her skirts up, grabbing a handful of cloth at each side and lifting to reveal her bare feet.
Dalip snagged the lantern to hold over her head. The shadows leapt and flowed, and they made her feel less brave with every foot forward. The dark, the noise, the wind: Stanislav could be anywhere in the castle, in any form, hiding deliberately or actively seeking them out.
The stairs unwound to the bottom. The storm howled at the doorway, sucking at the air inside one moment, blustering it back in the next. Lightning crackled, tearing thunder from the clouds and rolling it around the natural bowl of rock that was outside the walls.
‘Back to where we saw him before?’ she asked – shouted at – Dalip.
‘It’s where we start.’
The lantern, despite its cover, guttered and died. The liminal light in the sky was insufficient to make out detail, but when the lightning flickered and stabbed at the mountain-top, it was enough to show that the guard house, and part of the wall beyond, had collapsed into ruin.
‘Stanislav?’
They approached slowly. Mary’s skirts threatened to turn into a sail and carry her away, and Dalip was bent over against the swirling wind that tried to rob the words from their mouths.
The building was blown down, or out. Loose blocks of stone lay in a heap, and wooden beams stuck out of the remains of the sagging roof like broken ribs.
‘Do you suppose he’s under there?’ she said to Dalip’s ear.
It took him a moment to parse the words, then put his mouth to her ear. ‘We can’t dig. Not by ourselves.’
They reversed positions again. ‘It’d be easier for us if he was.’
He took a step back, nothing but darker black against the night. When the lightning flashed – close, so close that the concussion was almost simultaneous. ‘I owe him,’ he said in the silence afterwards.
‘So let’s keep looking.’
They moved unsteadily towards the partly fallen wall. Debris was both inside and out, and Mary suddenly realised what this was. She beckoned Dalip down to her height.
‘The castle is being reburied. With so few people here now, it’s sinking back into the ground. It grows, it dies.’
She’d thought that Crows’ castle had been a ruin when she’d first arrived. It hadn’t: it had been sprouting, new growth despite the appearance of age. There’d been no piles of stones, no ragged beams, no mounds of cracked roofing slates to see. Those were the signs of a dying building, not one rising from the ground. She had so much to learn, and she’d do it, assuming she lived long enough.